Top: Frank Gehry’s
IAC Building in
Chelsea. Bottom
left to right: The
New York Times
building by Renzo
Piano and Ian
Schrager’s 40
Bond Street.
owner, disco-king-turned-hotelier Ian Schrager,
has decided to move in himself.
Schrager isn’t the only entrepreneur with
visions of artistic glory—and a willingness to
pay for it. After decades of frontier-style, build-it-quick-and-they-will-come construction, New
York developers are embracing great (read:
expensive) design as the very best thing—or at
a minimum, worth costing out. At a Columbia
Graduate School of Architecture symposium
last fall titled “The Enlightened Developer?,”
the dean, Mark Wigley, wryly noted that the old
chestnut about New York—“It’s beautiful because
it never lets the architects get anywhere”—is
giving way to a more high-minded view that
invites former enemies to be friends and make
great works together.
Among the enlightened developers crowding
the mic was Tony Goldman, who, with the help of
BKSK Architects, is building his own cutting-edge
condo on Bond Street. Describing himself as a sea-
soned, pragmatic urban planner—in other words,
someone who might normally balk at the notion
of a Jerusalem-stone facade and a hand-sculpted
granite sidewalk—he generously observed that
“true collaboration elevates all participants.”
Although it’s hard to put a price tag on col-
laborating with a ruthlessly tasteful architect,
it obviously drives up costs. Gehry reportedly
walked away from the Times project after disagree-
ments over control. But who can put a price on
glory—or the purring of a design establishment
that has swelled to include not only old-line critics
but also bloggers, chat groups and even tweens?
Winning a smile from his 12-year-old daughter,
says developer Louis Dubin, whose latest condo
gussies up Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, makes
all the hard work worthwhile.
“There’s financial capital and there’s emotional
capital,” he told the audience at Columbia. Not
that some developers mind more mundane returns: At the
time, Dubin was listing some of his Harlem apartments at
$5.7 million. And if Schrager seems to have no regrets about
indulging a Pritzker Prize-winning team, keep in mind that he
is selling the results at $3,000 a square foot—in contrast, he
notes, with the $700 to $800 that sellers used to get on this
once-scrappy block.
are demanding bragging rights, and buildings again bear
brand names, reflecting not only a change in tastes but also
the transcendence of a celebrity-obsessed culture.
“Not since the days of Robert Moses has New York been
in the process of such a radical physical transformation,”
The Architect’s Newspaper declared in an August 2007 issue
devoted to developers, “and at such a breakneck pace.”
Although many factors are feeding into the design frenzy,
one New York architect, Guy Geier, sums it up this way:
“High-profile tenants want to be in high-profile buildings.”
The Ego Aesthetic
Forget Donald Trump’s bland opaque bruisers. The new ego
aesthetic is embodied in eccentric edifices like Frank Gehry’s
West Side homage to Barry Diller, the IAC Building; Renzo
Piano’s Midtown meditation on journalistic transparency, the
new New York Times building; and an over-the-top condominium at 40 Bond Street, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog
& de Meuron with such attention to detail that the building’s
The Mayor’s Manhattan
There are other, more cosmic reasons the city is turning away
from its grubby past, says Rosalie Genevro, executive director
of the Architectural League.
“The Bloomberg administration has been a strong advocate of good architecture and has helped create a tone and expectation in the private and public realms,” she says, echoing
remarks made by architects engaged in both kinds of work.
According to this trickle-down theory, Mayor Michael
Bloomberg has overseen a citywide campaign to upgrade
the visual environment, touching off a me-too response
